


Checking Up

by laureltreedaphne



Category: Ocean's Eleven (2001)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-05
Updated: 2014-11-05
Packaged: 2018-02-24 06:44:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2571953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laureltreedaphne/pseuds/laureltreedaphne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summer in an LA hotel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Checking Up

**Author's Note:**

> Migrating fic over from LiveJournal - this is from 2005.

The hotel is nice. It isn’t perfect, Linus has never been a fan of the ultra-modern, streamlined look, but it’s nice. The mini-bar is ridiculously well stocked – it has everything from California microbrews to some weird New Zealand vodka called 42 Below to South African wines. There’s even a little card informing him that if the mini-bar doesn’t have his drink of choice, the hotel will procure it for him at no extra charge. The card is signed in big, italic letters, “RCR”. Linus spends his days trying out everything the mini-bar has to offer and watching TV. His nights are spent doing lifts. The guests are easy marks – businessmen, tourists, celebrities. The B-list celebrities are the best, not famous enough to have bodyguards, and too self-absorbed to pay attention to anything going on around them. Linus has known since his first lift that people keep a surprising amount of stuff in their wallets, and celebrities are no exception. He reckons he could make a good living blackmailing all the celebrities with what he’s found out. Instead, he lifts the wallets, looks through them, and then practices putting them back into pockets. It keeps him entertained, at least. 

Every night he goes back to his room, orders room service (each dish, he’s amused to see, is named after a crime caper movie – the tiramisu is “The Italian Job”, a spicy curry dish is “The Sting”) and waits for Rusty to knock on the door. He’s been in L.A. for about a month now, he came after he got bored in Chicago waiting for classes to start. He’s not stupid enough to think that Rusty doesn’t know he’s here, but he’s not sure whether Rusty is deliberately ignoring him or is just too busy to deal with him at the moment. 

In July, he gets tired of waiting. He lifts Chad Michael Murray’s wallet and uses the guy’s Visa card to pay for his room. Rusty arrives the next morning, just as Linus is making himself a New Zealand-style Bloody Mary.

“Using a hot card in the same place you made the lift?” Rusty asks, shaking his head. “Sloppy, Linus.” 

Linus frowns. “It was a signal.” 

Rusty’s looking particularly tasteless today – shiny purple tie, shiny purple shirt that’s just a bit too tight across his chest. His slacks look normal, until he turns and the light catches them and Linus realizes that they, too, are shiny. He’s eating from a jumbo-sized bag of Doritos, despite the fact that it’s nine in the morning. For a moment he just chews, looking at Linus. Then he shrugs. “Okay.” 

Linus shoves a hand into his pocket, fitting his hand around Chad Michael Murray’s stupid looking wallet. “It was.” 

A girl wearing a crisp white blouse and a nametag that reads “Valerie” sticks her head into the room. “There’s a problem in 113,” she tells Rusty. 

“I’ll be right there.” Rusty finishes off his Doritos and crumples the bag into a little ball before shooting it into the trashcan. It lands on the rim, hovers for a moment, and then falls in. “Is there something you need, Linus?” 

This is not what Linus wants, five minutes in a hotel room, just one other problematic guest for Rusty to deal with. He tosses the stolen wallet to Rusty, who catches it with one hand. “Come back tonight,” he says, “and I’ll tell you.”

*

Saul was the first, about a month and a half after the job. He said he was traveling through Chicago, wanted to take Linus to lunch to catch up on things. At the time, he had been using a German accent, and refused to drop it, no matter how annoying Linus found it. They went to a restaurant that claimed to serve the best Wiener Schnitzel in Illinois, and Linus refrained from pointing out the fact that the restaurant was actually Austrian. Saul, apparently, wanted to know everything going on in Linus’ life. Had he bought any new cars? Jewelry for a girlfriend? What was his apartment like? 

Two months later, Basher stopped by. Scouting for talent, he said. And by the way, Linus wasn’t planning on taking any expensive vacations was he? Danny and Tess stopped by a while after Danny got out of jail – just to see how he was doing. 

The worst was his dad. He took Linus to a Sox game, then spent the first five innings quizzing him about Swiss bank accounts. 

They weren’t doing it to anyone else. Not even the Malloys. Linus had checked. 

“We’re not checking up on you,” Rusty says that night. “Everyone visits everyone else. Danny’s been here four times.” 

Linus tries to laugh cynically, but starts coughing instead. “That’s you and Danny. I…you told my Dad. I know it was you, you’re the one who organizes this sort of thing.”

Rusty tips a can of salted peanuts back into his mouth, looking at Linus with an expression of wide-eyed innocence. “What sort of thing?” 

“Just don’t do it anymore.” 

“You don’t want people to visit anymore?” 

Linus thinks about the look that had been on his mother’s face when she told him his father wanted to spend the day with him. “I’m staying here for the summer.” 

Rusty stands up, wiping his salty hands with a napkin he’s drawn from some mysterious place on his person. “No more lifting from the guests.”

*

Linus doesn’t see Rusty for a week. On Saturday, overcome with boredom, he runs into Rusty in the lobby, lifts his car keys, and drives to Disneyland. He hasn’t conned since that night in the casino, but he isn’t willing to pay $53.00 to walk around an overcrowded theme park, so he does his best to convince the woman at the turnstile that he’s an employee who’s forgotten his pass. To his surprise, it works. 

He lifts the wallet off of the first person he sees out of habit – an overweight, haggard looking man holding two little girls by the hand. The guy starts towards one of the street vendors to buy the girls ice cream, and immediately Linus feels bad. He returns the wallet, and spends the rest of the day lifting only from people who are using wheelchairs to jump the lines. The way Linus sees it, there’s a difference between conning and just plain cheating. 

He drives back to the hotel with the top down and the radio on – the CDs Rusty has in the car are so bad that Linus is convinced they’re a joke. When he gets back to the room, there’s a note beside the mint on his pillow: “Next time, just ask.” 

*  
“Feel like going to a movie premiere?” Rusty is standing beside his bed, eating an ice cream cone. Linus, having just taken a shower, is only wearing a towel. It takes him a moment to get his bearings and answer back. By the time he does, Rusty is down to the cone. 

“Do I need to dress up?” 

Rusty points to the closet. There’s a suit hanging on the door, and Linus would have noticed if it weren’t for the whole towel thing. There’s a smile in Rusty’s voice when he says, “I’ll see you in the lobby at eight.”

Linus gets to the lobby at seven fifteen and watches Rusty work. Even though he’s gone straight, he’s still conning; he manages to convince every guest that they’re his most important customer, and everyone who approaches him with a complaint leaves thinking they’ve gotten exactly what they wanted. Linus wonders if Rusty even realizes he’s doing it, or if it just comes naturally to him. 

The movie sort of sucks, but the after-party is great. Linus lifts four bracelets and two necklaces. He even lifts someone’s tie, just to prove to Rusty that he can. They stick around just long enough to see the guy’s reaction when he catches sight of himself in the mirror. 

In the car, Rusty reaches over and pulls the tie out of Linus’ pocket, then ties it around the rear-view mirror as if it’s some kind of trophy. “You’ve gotten a lot better,” he says. 

On the way home Linus learns, to his dismay, that the CDs are not a joke. “Barry Manilow?” he asks. 

Rusty grins. “You’ve got to love a performer.”

*

On Rusty’s birthday they drive to Reno. Danny’s supposed to come but he gets waylaid at the last moment by some sort of Tess-related emergency, so it’s just the two of them, going from casino to casino. Rusty wins everything he plays, even roulette. Linus manages to lose $500. On the way home Rusty pulls into some weird scenic overpass and teaches Linus how to play Poker on the hood of the car, teaches him how to read tells and how to keep his face blank. When they get back to the hotel he tries to teach Linus how to bluff, but by that point they’re both too drunk to do anything but laugh. 

“I don’t know why you guys think you need to check up on me,” Linus says while they’re lying side by side out on the balcony. They’re so close that he can feel the heat coming from Rusty’s body.

“On my first con, I got beaten up, then arrested,” Rusty answers a couple of minutes later. “I was selling fake concert tickets, and I tried to sell a pair of them to one of the bouncers. I could barely move for a few weeks.” He sits up a little bit and takes a long pull from the nearly empty vodka bottle. “You’re doing good, Linus.” 

*

Linus is surprised to learn that Rusty doesn’t live in the hotel. His house is a little ways outside the city, nice but not too nice. There’s a picture from Danny and Tess’ second wedding on the fridge, next to an invitation to the opening of Rusty’s hotel. Linus spends his whole Saturday learning how to draw out the bluff, and by early Sunday morning he’s just drunk enough and just confident enough to agree to a game of strip poker. 

He loses surprisingly quickly. By the time he’s down to nothing but his boxers and socks, Rusty is still wearing everything but his tie. Rusty stands up to get another beer, and Linus stands too, blocking his way. Deliberately, he slides his hand into the pocket of Rusty’s pants – not a lift, just a take – and pulls out the trick deck. 

“You’re cheating,” he accuses, smiling at Rusty, who has orange Cheeto dust on the corner of his mouth. 

“All part of the lesson,” Rusty grins, and then Linus is tasting Cheeto dust and being pressed up against the card table. 

Linus pulls back. “How much have you had to drink?” He knows, of course, they’ve been together all day, but it feels like something he should ask anyway.

Rusty licks his neck. “Enough,” he says, and Linus watches as a tattooed hand disappears into his boxers. The felt of the card table is pressing into the back of his thighs, and when Rusty pushes him to lie down he’s pretty sure he ends up with several cards plastered to his back. He decides he doesn’t care. 

*

“The hotel, man,” Rusty says the next morning over breakfast. “It’s killing me.” Linus looks up in surprise. Rusty isn’t looking at him; he’s concentrating on pouring an obscene amount of syrup over his waffles, which are already coated in whipped cream. But he’s definitely talking to him – there isn’t anyone else at the table. Linus spends an hour listening to Rusty talk about taxes and zoning permits and the way everyone wants something for nothing in this town. Rusty pays the bill and drives Linus back to the hotel, and once Linus is back in his room he finds the deck of trick cards in his pocket. 

“I hear you’ve been living at the hotel,” Reuben says when he calls later that day. He continues before Linus has a chance to say anything else. “You know, Danny’s been pretty busy with Tess lately,” he says, and after talking for a while about fortune tellers he hangs up. Linus isn’t quite sure why everyone has to be so cryptic, but he’s almost sure that he gets what Reuben’s saying.

*

They’re lying in bed at the hotel the night before Linus has to go back to Chicago when Rusty says, “I knew the card thing was a signal.” 

And Linus doesn’t know if he’s telling the truth or if he’s conning him, he hasn’t learned how to read Rusty’s tells yet, he isn’t sure if he ever will. But Rusty’s smiling at him, and Linus knows that there won’t be anymore unexpected visits once he’s back in Chicago. He decides he doesn't care - con or no con, it feels like approval.


End file.
